What I’ve Been Watching

Well, we haven’t been very faithful in updating the blog.  I’ve watched several movies in the past few months, but haven’t written reviews of any of them.  Rather than go back and try to do an individual post for each one, I’ll just give a brief summation of each along with my analysis.

Inglorious B-sterds

So far, I’ve probably found this to be the most entertaining movie of the year.  Director Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill) gives World War II a facelift in this re-imagining of how things would have taken place if America had sent bounty hunting Jewish-Americans behind enemy lines.  There was so much to like here, from the myriad subplots, to the engaging dialogue, and the marvelous performances, that it would be hard to pick any one thing that it didn’t excel at.  Christopher Waltz, who played a smarmy S.S. officer, is probably going to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and I’m hard pressed to think of a performance more worthy than his.  My personal favorite was Brad Pitt, who plays a rube lieutenant who leads his bounty hunters into battle.  I also thought, in terms of plot, that it was artfully done the way Tarantino mixed serious themes with more humorous ones.  It gives the story real heart and makes the protagonists highly sympathetic characters.  There’s no doubt who the bad guys and good guys are in this one, and that’s alright.  All in all, I’m hard pressed to think of a movie I’ve enjoyed more this year.

A Serious Man

This is the Coen Brothers (O Brother Where Art Thou, No Country For Old Men) latest, and honestly, I thought it was the most intelligent movie I’ve seen this year.  It was the kind of movie that leaves you something to chew on, something to think about days after you saw it.  The movie is about a Jewish teacher who is in the midst of all kinds of family crises.  His wife is leaving him, his son is smoking pot, his daughter doesn’t respect him, and his application for tenure at the university where he teaches is in jeopardy.  The movie encapsulates the way he struggles to deal with it all, and really gives you something to think about.  As with any Coen Brothers film, its artfully done in terms of how it’s shot, dialogue, storyline, etc.  The actors are pretty much all unknowns, but give fantastic performances.  If you are in the mood for a thought provoking story and good film symbolism, check this out.

Bright Star

This is a film about the life of British poet John Keats, or rather, his two year romance with Fanny Brawne, and the effect it had on his poetry.  It’s directed by Jane Campion, and it is the best shot movie I’ve seen all year.  D.P. Greig Fraser definitely deserves to be nominated, because this movie looks fantastic.  The shots, the colors, I loved everything about the way it looked.  But beyond that, the movie is just a great, classic love story.  John Keats (Ben Whishaw) is a struggling poet when he meets middle class Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and it doesn’t take long before sparks begin to fly.  The chemistry between the leads is great, and Cornish gives the best female performance I’ve seen this year.  She’s brilliant as Fanny, making her a nuanced, complex character that the audience can really connect with.  What makes this movie so powerful is the restraint that’s shown.  Romantic movies today usually have no idea how to depict love, showing a lot of passion, but rarely showing restraint.  Bright Star nails this–the bond between the two characters is not based on a physical relationship but it portrays the intertwining of two souls.  I also loved the way the movie incorporates Keats poetry, making it a part of the story, almost a character in its own right.

I’ve missed quite a lot of movies that I wanted to go see, but that’s life, I guess.  I do hope to go see 2012 this weekend, which I’m fully anticipating to be a “so-bad-its-good” type of movie.  If possible it looks worse than GI Joe and Transformers 2 combined, so I think it’s worth a few laughs, at least.

Zombieland

A-

Who knew that mad cow disease could morph into something much worse than a few sick cows?

Clearly not the American public.  By the time they become cognizant to the fact that mad cow disease is a bit more serious than they imagined, three quarters of the populace has been reduced to mindless zombies, oozing black bile from their mouths and attacking anyone not a zombie in an insane desire to feast on their flesh.  The only way someone can survive in this post-apocalyptic mess is to establish a few rules.

For a lone geeky college student dubbed “Columbus” (Jesse Eisenberg) after his home town, it’s more than a few rules.  It’s a list of at least thirty-one different rules that he religiously adheres to in order to keep all of his body parts intact.  They include things like “Cardio,” because as he points out, when the zombie disease began to spread, if you had an extra pound of flesh it was that much easier for the zombies to catch you and take it.  Or another rule, like “Beware of bathrooms.”  Because zombies may be mindless flesh-eaters, but they aren’t completely stupid.  Where better to catch unsuspecting prey then when they are at their most vulnerable?

For other survivors, there aren’t quite as many rules, but they have rules nevertheless.  For lone wolf Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), it’s pretty much one rule.  Kill every zombie you see.  And he’s pretty good at it too.  He finds inventive ways of killing zombies, including hedge trimmers, baseball bats, and a banjo.  He makes zombie killing look easy.  He’s a free spirit, pretty much the exact opposite of Columbus, but the two meet on the road and decide to team up.  Tallahassee has just one weakness:  Twinkies.  And its this craving that leads them to a supermarket where they meet two MORE loners, sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin).  The sisters at first appear to be helpless and scared, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that they are scam artists using their talents to survive in a zombie infested world.  Nevertheless, this rag-tag team of survivors decides to stick together all the way to the Pacific coast in the hopes that teamwork might keep them all alive.

Zombie Killer of the Week?

This is, in my opinion, one of the most entertaining movies of the year.  Eisenberg’s dry wit, Harrelson’s sarcasm, and Stone’s cynicism make for the perfect combination, and when you combine that with goofy zombies of every shape, size, and color, it makes for a hilarious film.  I thought the chemistry between the stars was great, and the performances were excellent, particularly Harrelson as Tallahassee.  He always has a quick quip for everything that happens, and his character actually has some depth.

I also enjoyed the constant slow motion shots of zombies chasing people, usually accompanied by captions that explained Columbus’ “rules.”  They were usually good for a laugh, along with providing anecdotal points that added a great deal of humor.  I also enjoyed the way that backstories were provided for the characters, which really made them a lot more sympathetic and likeable.  And of course, there were the myriad inventive ways in which zombies were killed:  cars, sledgehammers, theme park rides,  pianos, and the usual shotguns and uzi’s.

The dialogue, though, was the best part.  Line after line of engaging, witty verbage that made you laugh…the best comparison I can make is that if you crossed Juno with any zombie movie Zombieland would be the result.  That’s high praise, considering Juno had one of the wittiest scripts in the last five years.  Harrelson, in particular, has some of the best lines, but Eisenberg’s constant narration throughout the movie has a lot of moments of dry humor contained in it, and the ripostes between he and Harrelson are fantastic.

Nut Up or Shut Up

There really wasn’t much here not to enjoy.  If you are a bit on the squeamish side there are a couple of bloody, gory moments, but most of it is over the top and not realistic violence, and it’s played for laughs.  I found it to be well crafted, well acted, and generally one of the better movies I’ve seen this year.  If I had any major complaint, it is that I could’ve watched a bit longer.

District 9 is a fascinating tale of Aliens and Apartheid

A
In a world where every movie seems to be a remake, reboot, sequel,
prequel, based on an old TV show, cartoon, or even toys, one film defies
the odds and dares to be different. With its cast of unknowns, District
9 is the most original movie of the year, which is quite astonishing.
(Especially when the words original and Hollywood are about as opposite
as change and the Obama Administration.) I know this is a short
introduction, but there is a lot to say so I’ll move on.

Plot

We get a little back story in the beginning of the film and it plays
out in a series of interviews and news clips. We learn that about 20
years ago, an alien aircraft came to rest a few hundred feet above the
city of Johannesburg, South Africa. Curiosity gets the best of the city
and they send in a team to find out what or who is in the spacecraft.
They discover an entire civilization clinging to life inside the city in
the sky. They do what any good human would, they help them out. After a
while, they aren’t sure what else to do with the visitors, so they
quarantine them in District 9. This is done because of several violent
outbursts from both the aliens, called prawns, and humans as well as
depleting resources and patience
20 years later, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is a dimwitted
employee of Multinational United (MNU) a weapons research and security
subcontracting company. He is given the job of serving eviction notices
to the prawns. MNU have taken over control of District 9 and have
developed a new concentration camp for the aliens further from the city,
and are enacting a relocation program. When we first enter District 9
with Wikus and his military entourage, you can practically smell the
squalor that the prawns live in. Mountains of trash and dead animal
carcasses are scattered throughout the streets and in between their
shacks that are about 2 feet apart. As Wikus and the crew go through the
slum, he is also on the lookout for weapons. Human or alien, it
doesn’t matter. The prawns’ weapons are superior, but humans are
unable to use them. He stumbles upon some sort of tube in a shack and
confiscates it, but not before opening it and releasing some of it’s
content into his face. This proves to be a deadly mistake as he begins
to slowly transform into a prawn.
Once this is discovered, he is hunted by the government and MNU who
have been failing to develop their own hybrid through terrible means.
There is only one place he can go where they will not follow, and that
is with the disgusting minority he was trying to evict.
What follows is a transformation of not just him physically, but
humanly as well. What’s interesting is that his friends and family see
him changing into more of a monster, yet the prawns see him become more
sensitive towards them and their plight.
The movie doesn’t paint the prawns to be an evil race of aliens, bent
on world domination. That is left to the humans, and makes sense when
you think of all that had taken place in South Africa just 20 years ago.
Not that the prawns are completely innocent, but they are just reacting
to the circumstances they are in, revolting when what little freedom
they have is taken away.  This works on so many levels, from race to
social class, where the higher class is controlling what will happen
with the prawns, and those who oppose this in any way are a threat.

Best Bits

Well the subtext and allegory of this movie are what make it stand out
from any other sci-fi flick you’ve ever seen before. It’s remarkable
that a summer action movie can also have a brain and a heart. It does
this with out being preachy as well, which is a fine line to walk.
The visuals in this movie will blow you away. Think of this; it cost
them $30 million to make District 9 and $200-300 million to make
Transformers 2. I thought Transformers 2 looked really good, but this
movie looks just as good and seamless. It is shot in a documentary style
which gives it a gritty and visceral feel. Director Neil Blomkamp,
Cinematographer Trent Opaloch, and Editor Julian Clarke have done a
fantastic job getting this vision to the screen. Thanks to Producer
Peter Jackson, this movie is opening in a wide release.
The actors, although unknown, are tremendous. Sharlto Copley is
brilliant in the lead role. He plays Wikus as a simplistic dweeb that
has his mind opened to an evil corporation he has devoted years to. His
alteration is extraordinarily believable and heart-breaking.
The violence is graphic and in your face. There is no shying away from
it. This is no doubt an R rated movie and the violence doesn’t let you
forget that.  There is a gun in it that makes people explode…. and they
use it….a lot. Enough said!
There is a level of unsettling intensity throughout the whole movie.
You never know what’s going to happen, unless you read this review,
and even then, there are many surprises.
The aliens and the story never seem cheesy or tacky. You can tell a lot
of effort was put into making this as real an experience as possible.

Worst Pieces

I honestly do not have a complaint about this movie. It could’ve been
longer. Couldn’t help myself.

Conclusion

Go see this movie right now! This is the best film I have seen this
year. I was going to say by far the best, but I just watched The Hurt
Locker last night and that was crazy good as well. It’s not for
everybody, and some people just won’t get it, but that doesn’t
change the fact that it is an original film done in a very authentic
way. It is one of the most honest films done about human behavior as well.
This should be the biggest movie of the summer, but it’s not rated
PG-13 and it’s not about toys from when I was a child and is actually
a great movie, so I guess it will have to suffice being # 1 at the box
office it’s opening weekend.

The Hurt Locker

A

Every day, millions of Americans wake up, get dressed, and go to work on a 9 to 5 shift.  Nothing special, they just have a job to do, and so they go to their place of employment and do it.

The guys in The Hurt Locker do the same thing, with one exception:  Every day they leave to do their job, they go with the understanding that it very well could be their last.  They are bomb technicians in the US Army, and their job every day is to risk the heat, sniper fire, and explosive material to make Iraq a safer place.  They have been trained to defuse and clear IED’s on the grimy streets of Baghdad, and make no mistake, it’s a risky business.  They deal with death every day, and the constant stress of their job slowly grinds away at them.  But they know their business, and they continue to do it faithfully, day after day, praying that they make it til the end of their rotation and they can return home in one piece.  Each time they go out, though, the cards are stacked against them.

Defusing An Explosive Situation

When the story starts, we are introduced to Sergeant Sanborn and Specialist Eldridge.  These two men are part of the aforementioned bomb squad, and when we meet them they are doing what they do, looking for IED’s and attempting to defuse them.  Defusing an IED is risky business and certain precautions are taken.  For starters, they send out a little remote controlled robot to comb through trash and rubble, where insurgents often choose to hide the devices in the hopes of taking out American military personnel.  Once they find the bombs, they decide whether it is best to defuse them, or to clear the streets and blow them.  Defusing them is a high risk process that involves the bomb technician strapping himself into a huge kevlar and steel plated suit that looks like something an astronaut would wear, and walking down the street in clear view of any potential snipers or terrorists that would decide to take a pot shot at you.  Then, they have to attempt to defuse the bomb, hopefully before it’s watchful creator, who may be waiting in the wings for just such a moment, can detonate it remotely.  All in all, it takes a special kind of person to do this work, and many who embark on it don’t always make it out healthy and whole.

Such is the case for Sanborn and Eldridge’s team leader at the opening of the Hurt Locker.  He attempts to defuse an IED, and all too late Sanborn spots an innocent looking butcher with a cell phone in his hand, who detonates the bomb which kills the bomb tech.  In the midst of dealing with their grief, Sanborn and Eldridge are introduced to their new tech leader, Staff Sergeant William James.  They quickly discover he doesn’t like to do things the conventional way.  On their first mission out, he refuses the use of the robot, instead suiting up and walking down the street to discover where the bombs are himself.  He uses smoke canisters as a distraction, which also limits the visibility of his team from covering him.  And as they go on more and more missions, they discover that rather than the fear that comes naturally to most men when stepping into life threatening situations, James seems to thrive on such moments.  It’s as if war is a drug, and being in a high risk environment is the greatest high he can get.  He throws away his headset when defusing a car bomb.  He takes off his suit in the process, also, the reasoning being that if he’s going to die, he would rather die comfortably.  And yet, through it all, his team finds themselves inextricably drawn to him, all the while wondering, with only 38 days left in Iraq, whether they will live to make it home.

A Different Kind of War Movie

Since the inception of the Iraq war, many movies have been made about it, most of them heavy handed moralizing about the decision to invade Iraq.  Most have been against, a few have been for, but the Hurt Locker is not defined by either category.  It’s not about the rightness or wrongness of the decisions made, it’s about men doing a gritty, intense job in one of the most unsafe zones on the planet.  And believe me, if one word could be used to summarize this movie, it would be intense.  The bomb team finds themselves in one sticky situation after another, defusing IED’s in the street, dealing with unwilling suicide bombers, or being pinned down by snipers.  The gritty realism of this film works better than any war movie I’ve seen since Saving Private Ryan, and is perhaps even more striking than that one since this deals with a much more recent war.

The cast does a great job, Jeremy Renner leading the way with his portrayal of James.  He’s a complex character, with a wife and a kid, who seems perfectly at home trying to defuse bombs with sniper fire going off all around him, but struggles in the supermarket with which cereal to buy.  His interactions with Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are also complex, because while a part of them seems to hate him and the casual way he treats death, the other part seems to respect him for his calm demeanor and his willingness to lay his life on the line.  While some movies seem to treat US servicemen as dysfunctional crazies (Jarhead, anyone?) this movie does a great job of showing them to be dedicated, yet also very conscious of their own mortality.  Geraghty in particular brings real life to Eldridge, who struggles with the thought of dying in Iraq and not making it back home.  And James also interacts with other characters which add an emotional core to the story.  He befriends a young Iraqi boy named Beckham, and the subsequent unfolding of events brings real life to these seemingly mundane interactions.

Kathryn Bigelow, the director, did a fine job of directing and shooting the movie, placing you in the story and keeping you on the edge of your seat.  As the bomb techs head out to defuse the bomb, Iraqi citizens watch from various vantage points, and without anything being said, it’s so clear how that any of them could be an enemy, and several times the camera cuts away to their viewpoint so that you never know where or when an attack is coming.  The camera also sometimes bobs and jerks, giving it a kind of “on the ground” feel that makes it seem more realistic.  This sense of never knowing and “always in it” makes the movie that much more dramatic.

All in all, this was a very good movie, one of the best this year.  It’s also very gritty and very intense…not a summer actioner, but a thought provoking and emotional story that leaves you with a great deal of respect for servicemen who risk their lives every day for others.

G.I. Joke: When All Else Fails, So Does the Script, the Dialogue, and the Acting

D+

When I was growing up, I had a lot of different toys that I played with and a lot of different cartoons that I watched.  I loved the Justice League of America, Transformers, the A-Team, and countless other little “teams” of soldier type characters that battled evil every Saturday.  But I loved none as much as G.I. Joe, the real American hero, who battled the evil Cobra all across the globe in a never ending fight for freedom.  I bought hundreds of the toys, made gigantic fortresses out of bricks and constantly had my Joe’s waging war against the enemy.

So as an adult, when I heard that they were making a live action film of my favorite childhood toy, my interest was immediately piqued.  After all, G.I. Joe had the potential to be a great summer action franchise…plenty of interesting characters, weaponry, and several very cool villains.  Alas…when making anything into a movie, be it a comic book, a child’s toy, or an old Saturday morning cartoon, there a few indispensable elements that Hollywood seems to have a hard time putting into movies these days.  They are called plot and dialogue, and they are both absent in this big screen bust.  Seriously…this is a terrible movie.  I mean, really bad.  Hasbro, the maker of the G.I. Joe toys, had already jaded our summer movie excitement by screwing up the second installment of Transformers 2.  But things get even uglier with this second perversion of a beloved toy franchise.

Ok, so the good news is that if you expect this movie to be bad going in, you can still have fun.  I think the producers and director, Stephen Sommers (The Mummy franchise) KNEW this was a bad movie and so didn’t try to hard to make it fit within the confines of any reality.  I suspected once I saw the first trailer this movie was going to be a stinker, and my suspicions continued to be reinforced right up until the time I sat down to watch it.  It met all my exceedingly low expectations.  That said, I was still entertained, even if a few brain cells were destroyed in the process.  You can’t help but feel dumber for having seen this, but it’s ok…you’ll have a good time anyway.

The Story…Or What Resembles One

The story starts with a flashback to 17th century France, where an arms merchant named McMullen is being sentenced for selling arms to France’s enemies.  Before he undergoes his punishment (an iron mask ala Alexandre Dumas) he says that his descendants will continue the business of selling arms and become more powerful, yada yada yada.  Fast forward to the future, and you see one of his descendants announcing the creation of a new weapon called nanomites, some kind of nanotechnology that can eat through anything.  McMullen has had his research funded by NATO, and they are transporting it somewhere or another, but in the meantime he is secretly plotting to hijack the transport team and steal the nanomites for his own motives.  He sends one of his best operatives, a stunning and vicious woman known as the Baroness (Sienna Miller) to get the nanomites.  The Baroness encounters stiff resistance from two members of the transport team, Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) who are then joined by secret operatives who prevent the theft of the nanomites.  The operatives turn out to be G.I. Joe [led by General Hawk (Dennis Quaid)], a top secret global team that works against…well, I don’t know what, exactly, since there doesn’t seem to be any Cobra, at least not yet.  Anyway, they take possession of the nanomites, and Duke and Ripcord join the team.  Shortly thereafter, however, McMullen uses the Baroness, accompanied by a ninja named Storm Shadow and a master of disguise named Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) to infiltrate the Joes base and steal the nanomites.

It should be noted that this unfolding storyline is punctuated by flashbacks revealing several backstories that we just couldn’t live without.  First is the connection between Duke and the Baroness…turns out that at one time they were engaged to be married, and the Baroness was a nice little blonde who loved her man.  But due to an unfortunate (and I might add, completely predictable) turn of events, Duke sees her brother die in combat, feels responsible, and can’t face her again.  So she becomes the evil Baroness, a lieutenant to McMullen and his top scientist, a sinister looking guy with a mask over his face and a penchant for playing with cobra’s (hmmm…wonder who HE is going to become?).  Anyway, the other backstory is the one between G.I. Joe ninja Snake Eyes and the evil ninja Storm Shadow.  Apparently they were raised in the same dojo/monastery/whatever, and have always hated each other.  Storm Shadow kills their sensei/poobah/whatever, causing Snake Eyes to seek revenge.  As you can probably tell, the backstories are pretty cliched and you know where all this is heading, but like a bad train wreck, you can’t turn your head away.

So McMullen’s operatives finally get ahold of the nanomites, and he decides to unleash them on Paris as payback for what France did to his long dead ancestor.  And it’s up to the Joes to stop him.  In the process, the Joes cause more destruction to Paris than a thousand warheads equipped with nanomites ever could.  They cause massive traffic accidents, tear through buildings, smash everything within a 10 mile radius, and still are unable to stop the villains from bringing down the Eiffel Tower.   And oh yeah, the McMullen crew manages to capture Duke.  And they still  have more nanomites to foist on the rest of the world.  So the Joes must travel to McMullen’s secret base in the Arctic, to rescue their friend and stop the destruction that is being prepared to be unleashed across the globe.

Defying Logic AND Physics

Well, I’ve already mentioned a few problems that the movie has, but the complete list is so expansive, it’s hard to know where to begin.  Let’s start with the story.  It’s hard to imagine a story that has more plot holes or makes less sense.  The story starts with McMullen stealing nanomites that he created….why would he need to turn them over to NATO to begin with, only to have to steal them back?  Why didn’t he just keep them in the first place?  There are several “why did they need to do that” moments in the movie…like Zartan, the master of disguise, escapes from the G. I. Joe base…and then kills an Arab and steals his clothing in the middle of the desert.  Huh?  You’ve already made your escape…why do you need a disguise now?  Speaking of bases, both bases are supposed to be top secret, nearly impenetrable fortresses, yet they are accessed so easily that it brings you to believe a child with a broken pop gun and a pet hamster could break in, no problem.  Seriously, if you have an underground base in the Saraha, wouldn’t you put a few landmines around it so that enemies with giant drill like transportation devices couldn’t just waltz in and burn down your crib?

Of course, the real icing on the cake comes during the battle royale, when the baddies and the Joes are squaring off at the baddies base beneath  the Arctic ice in a vicious winner-takes-all brawl.   McMullen decides that the best way to take down the Joes is to blow the ice above the base and allow it to sink, crushing the base and everyone in or around it.  Of course, if one stops and thinks this plan through, you’ll realize that in order for it to work, ice would have to defy the laws of physics.  I mean, if icebergs sank, the Titanic wouldn’t have had a thing to worry about.  But in Joe world, up is down and down is up, and the best way for villains to kill heroes is to drown them by way of sinking ice.

Plot holes and physics defying lunacy are far from the only problem in this clunker.  The dialogue is the worst part.  McMullen’s ancestor screams for help as the iron mask is attached to his face, but a more hideous form of torture would be forcing him to read the G.I. Joe screen play a hundred times.  The dialogue in this movie makes a Michael Dudikoff film look like a TCM classic by comparison.  Lines like “You were almost killed, you have a right to be concerned” and “When all else fails, we don’t” abound.  In the final showdown between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, Storm Shadow says, “When our master was killed, you took a vow of silence.  Now you will die without a word.”  Or something like that.  In addition to being a horrible piece of dialogue, it’s also like a randomly thrown in fact…nowhere else in the whole movie is it explained why Snake Eyes doesn’t talk. As for other characters, Ripcord and Duke have an argument early on about his ability to pilot planes (even though he is not in the Air Force) and wouldn’t ya know it, at the end of the movie he is forced to pilot an advanced fighter jet created by McMullen, in an effort to bring down warheads armed with the nanomites.  Of course, the firing mechanism on the fighter is voice activated, so instead of pressing a button to fire a missile, you actually have to say the word “Fire!”  But wait!  There is a twist.  This is McMullen’s creation, and he’s Scottish, so you have to say the word “Fire” in GAELIC.  I kid you not.  I chortle as I write this at the sheer incomprehensibility of this plot device.  Luckily for Ripcord, one of the Joes just happens to know a bit of Gaelic (I guess…maybe they have a translating earpiece or something) and so is able to tell him how to operate the weapons system.  Again, this is another example of McMullen defying logic and doing something that makes absolutely no sense.  The best example of hilariously horrible dialogue, however, is after the destruction of Paris and the Eiffel Tower, when the the U.S. President is told that the “French are upset.”  The only thing that could have made that any better was the French threatening to write a very very bad letter.

Elsewhere, the bad guys murmur original and sophisticated last rite pronouncements such as “Now you die.”  Nice…haven’t heard that a thousand times before.  And of course, as the curtain is drawn on the major baddies, they tell us “This has only just begun.”  Really?  In this movie they steal their own weapons and try to make ice sink, so I don’t think the world has much to fear from them.  Of course, they could secretly be geniuses using the Joes to carry out their dirty work.  The nanomites are supposed to be their advanced weaponry, but the Joes are the ones who cause the real damage.  I refer to their complete destruction of Paris, although to be fair, the baddies have an SUV equipped with a fork lift that tosses cars like they were whiffle balls.  They have all this advanced sophisticated weaponry, yet Snake Eyes is able to use his sword to slice through the top of their SUV like it’s a can of soup.  Memo to Cobra…when making suits that repel everything from submachine guns to bazookas, you might want to check that it’s able to repel more primitive weaponry.  Had the Joes all carried pikes, maces, and longswords, this movie might have been an hour shorter.

The performances are, for the most part, absolutely atrocious.  That’s not to say some of them aren’t fun to watch…Arnold Vosloo may be campy, but he always is fun in the roles he plays.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a certain flair as the enigmatic and mysterious Doctor (AKA Cobra Commander).  Sienna Miller cavorts around in a leather catsuit most of the movie, and she brings a lot of energy to her role as cunning vicious vixen.  All that aside though, the acting is just terrible.  At the top of the list are the two heroes, Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans as Duke and Ripcord, respectively.  Tatum spends half the movie glowering and is never fun when he’s onscreen, which is not good considering that having fun with these one dimensional characters is all that can redeem them.  Wayans is a bit more full of life, but he becomes the latest addition to a long list of worst comedic sidekicks ever to appear in film, joining Jar-Jar Binks, Mudflap and Skids, and Bumpo from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.  He’s just not funny.  Dennis Quaid phones it in as Hawk.  Christopher Eccleston tries hard, but in the end he’s left with a script that makes him nothing less than the dumbest super-villain on the planet.

So what’s to like?  Well, as I said at the beginning, the movie knows it is bad, and most of the cast seems to know it too, so they play up their campy roles and act like they enjoy themselves, especially, as I mentioned, the villains.  Even if some of his dialogue was terrible, I enjoyed the character of Storm Shadow.  Byung-hun Lee, the actor who portrayed him, I thought showed some promise if he were placed in a more serious movie.   It was also probably a good idea to make Sienna Miller a major part of this movie.  In addition to looking good, she brought a lot of energy to the screen in spite of the fact that she had to share a good bit of it with the stiff and lifeless Tatum.

Some of the action sequences are cool, if a bit over the top.  Everyone has weaponry that is less realistic than the stuff you’d find in a Bond movie, but it was fun to watch nonetheless.  Pistols that send people flying farther than the Starship Enterprise, jet packs that are easily controllable, armor that’s virtually indestructible (against modern weapons), and all sorts of other gadgets and gizmos that were quite a pleasure to observe.  Also, there were several martial arts scenes that I thought were fun, usually involving Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow.

The bottom line is that no matter which way you cut it, this movie is atrociously bad but deliciously fun.  Go in with the same amount of expectations you might have for Saturday reruns of Dora the Explorer, and you should come out having had a good time anyway.  That said, no amount of fun can erase the fact that practically nothing about this movie makes any kind of sense.  The best decision the studio made was to keep critics from having an early look at it.